Humanism took over the House of Lords for a couple of hours in July, as peers gathered to take part in a debate on “Atheists and Humanists: Contribution to Society”, organised by Lord Harrison, a member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group.
To me, it seemed like an oddly sectional move. With religious groups regularly receiving praise from government, you could argue it’s really a simple call for equal recognition, but I can’t help feeling such a debate adds to a wider problem. If we’re celebrating the particular contribution of humanists to society, perhaps we should ask what that says about our view of society. In their rush to appeal to various religious groups, successive governments have shown a tendency to characterise society as comprising separate “communities” defined by their beliefs – do humanists really want to endorse that view by calling for recognition of their own tribe?
But maybe I'm thinking about this too hard. The debate went ahead in good spirits, and the peers who contributed found plenty to celebrate. Lord Harrison set the tone by pointing out that non-believers represent a “silent majority” in British society, and noting the many vital issues on which organised humanist groups have campaigned, including same-sex marriage, reproductive health, free speech, assisted dying and the role of religion in schools.
Harrison’s sentiments were echoed by a succession of speakers, some of them humanist, some of them not, who all stood to applaud the contributions of non-believers to British society. With even the Bishop of Birmingham and Lord Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford, heaping praise on humanists, the event was something of a love-in, but amid the admiration the debate did throw up at least one difficult issue for humanism.
Referring to his lengthy experience in organised non-belief, having been a founder of Cambridge Humanists in the 1950s, Lord Layard argued that, for all its achievements, humanism perhaps suffers from an identity crisis. “Humanism has done very well on the negative side,” explained Layard, “in rebutting unreasonable beliefs and unreasonable laws, but much less well on the positive side in providing a thriving and flourishing secular morality, which is what many of us had hoped it would do.”
The solution, said Layard, is for humanism to develop “a very simple ethical creed which can generate people’s energy, loyalty and commitment”. He suggested it might be based on the stance of an organisation he is involved with, Action for Happiness, which is itself based upon the Golden Rule. “It says,” Laynard told the House, “first, that everyone matters equally and, secondly, what matters about them is their quality of life as they experience it – in other words, their happiness. If you put the two together, you arrive at an obligation on each of us to try to produce as much happiness and as little misery as we can in the world.”
This commitment to positive ethics was repeated by several other speakers in the debate and, while it sounds very admirable, I can’t help wondering if it’s ultimately a little empty, or at least a little platitudinous. After all, you’d struggle to find many people expressing a commitment to producing as much unhappiness and as much misery in the world as possible – the real challenge is to ask what constitutes happiness, and this is where I see a problem when thinking about humanism’s broader aims.
For example, during the Lords debate, Lord Harries suggested that a potential area for agreement between religious people and humanists could lie in “moving our society away from the rampant individualism that now dominates our life”, citing the economist Michael Sandel and his work on the moral limits of markets. While plenty of humanists would no doubt agree with this, the problem is that the question of individualism and markets is a deeply political one and organised humanism has generally avoided broader political questions. The prevailing view is that humanism cuts across ideological lines, hence the fact that there are humanist groups within all three main political parties.
This works fine when campaigning on the obvious humanist issues, in particular those concerning the role of religion in society, but it becomes problematic when you consider how humanism might inform the debate about broader social and political issues. Take the NHS, for instance – we would surely all agree that good health care has a crucial role to play in increasing well-being, but a humanist could just as easily argue that privatisation offers the best hope for doing so as that it is vital we stand up to government cuts. The same would go for any number of big issues, from education and welfare to the environment and foreign policy. Humanists may share a commitment to being “good without God”, but one person’s good life without God could be another’s very bad life without God.
Should this matter? It depends on whether you think organised humanism should be aspiring to become a powerful movement for social change. A commitment to ethical living is very admirable, but if there’s no agreement on what ethical living (and ethical politics) should constitute, then can organised humanism ever become anything more than an interest group for people who don’t believe in God?
This article is published in the September/October 2013 issue of New Humanist.
